There are several questions continued here and I will try and answer them all.

Did theatre critics exist?

Not in the modern sense no. There were no newspapers nor was critics writing reviews of plays a part of London society in the era of Elizabeth and James; it really started in the reign of Charles I.

This is not to say there wasn’t a critical element to the Elizabethan/Jacobean stage. There was. Usually in the form of the audience.

Edmund Gayton describes audiences where ’the spectators frequently mounting the stage and making more bloody catastrophe among themselves than the players’ and “the benches, the tiles, the laths, the stones, oranges, apples, nuts flew about most liberally” if the play was not to their taste.

This being said, the main critical appraisal by the audience was simply the act of turning up. Many plays only performed for a few performances before numbers dropped and if a play kept getting numbers in for a run that lasted a week or more?

The ‘critics’ had spoken.

There was one other formal critical element; and that was the Crown. Being asked to perform for the queen or the new Stuart King was always seen as an approval of the play. Yet this could backfire.

In 1605 the Blackfriars Boys Company (then in their second year of being called the Children of the Queens Revels) performed the comedy ‘Eastward Ho!’ by John Marston, George Chatman and Ben Johnson. The play made ‘passing fun of King James Scottish accent and his freedom in conferring knighthoods those Scots who had accompanied him south’ (Donaldson p23).

James has Chatman and Johnson arrested and jailed and Marston fled. Johnson later complained he was threatened with having his nose and ears cut off. And the Blackfriars Boys Company lost its nice new title.

So there was that critical element to performing as well, but that was about it.

How was the quality of acting assessed?

Hard to say. Based on the above? If the audience wasn’t storming the stage or throwing things at you? You were doing well.

Actually while we know the names of famous actors and clowns, the ones who were designated a success anyway, we do not know what made them so successful in many cases.

I suppose to try and answer this question we need to answer the other two you asked...

What was considered good stage acting? Would it have resembled contemporary acting?

Like the previous question, this is difficult to answer because we do not know how the players of Shakespeare’s day actually performed. But we have taken some exciting steps in reconstructing it.

We can say that it 100% would NOT have resembled modern stage acting. But this is not to say it wouldn’t have been powerful.

There are basically two places I know who specialise in trying to match some of the performances techniques seen in the 16th Century. The first is The Globe Theatre in London, who will (on occasion) do performances in ‘original pronunciation’.

These are attempts to replicate English as it actually sounded back at the time. They are fascinating and reveal much. For one thing- the speed of it! There is a natural cadence to the language, which gives it a fast paced, almost staccato delivery. This is not language meant to be spoken slowly or with great pondering. This is a song-song fast moving tongue, with a strong accent that sounds similar to modern English West Country (Dorset/Devon) with hints of Irish.

Away from The Globe (and OP productions are usually special performances done maybe once in a run of a play- this is not a regular thing or it wasn’t anyway), the other specialist in Shakespeare is of course, The Royal Shakespeare Company (the RSC), who have mastered the art of performing the work of the Bard and his peers.

It is by the excellence of the work of the Globe and the RSC that we begin to reconstruct not only how it sounded or looked when performed (The Globe tended to try to match the look; the RSC tends to match how it sounded (without OP)) but their work has allowed us to spot clues in the scripts that aid us.

An example? Go find any Shakespeare written in imabic pentameter. There is one rule- you only pause at the end of the line. Never in the middle. Always at the end. Thus, if you go see Hamlet on stage and the actor goes *’To be, or not to be..’*and pauses. Or even worse- ’To be’ (pause) ’Or not to be’ pause)

They are not doing it the way it was done by the original cast (wherein the correct way would be to go ’To be or not to be that is the question’ (pause))

This is a technique known as ‘the sanctity of the line’ and it’s why stick in the muds like me (whose all up in his desire to recreate original conditions) have been known to get VERY huffy if an actor pauses in the wrong place.

Jokes aside, the main issue we have is simply this; much of the study of Shakespeare’s texts is academic. That’s perfectly fine but forgets the singular truth about his plays- they were never written to be studied.

Shakespeare probably had nothing at all whatsoever to do with the publishing of his plays. What we see are scripts; documents intended to be read solely by the actors themselves.

So for the above line: ‘To be or not to be that is the question’

An academic may point out that the above line ISN’T actually in iambic pentameter. It actually contains one beat to many:

‘To be or not to be that is the ques-tion’

An expert in grammar would point out that this irregular extra syllable is known as a feminine ending; and the literature expert would be quick to celebrate that the first four lines of that famous speech are written like this, displaying Shakespeare’s mastery of the language demonstrated by him playfully subverting its forms:

’To be or not to be that is the quest(ion)

Whether tis nobler in the mind to suff(er)

The slings and arrows of outrageous for(tune)

Or to take arms against a sea of troub(les)

And by opposing end them. To die to sleep...’

But for Richard Burbage, the first man to play Hamlet, a man skilled in iambic, the extra notes give him so much to work with.

It emphasises the last words (‘question’, ‘suffer’, ‘fortune’, ‘troubles’); the irregular pattern lets him know the character is suffering self-doubt and insecurity (his pattern of speaking has suddenly changed; suggesting his mental faculties are troubled); the irregularity is Hamlet’s emotional turbulence, until it ends.

And it ends as character stops talking about his issues and starts doing what Hamlet always does; begin an intellectual flight of fancy; he goes off to talk about what death may be like and the pattern returns to normal, his turmoil momentarily calmed.

All of this is the instruction to Burbage (and by default, every actor since) contained in the script; Shakespeare as director as well as writer.

Perhaps the most celebrated modern director of Shakespeare, Sir Peter Hall, summed it up best when he said:

”Shakespeare tells the actor when to go fast and when to go slow; when to come in on cue, and when to accent a particular word or series of words. He tells the actor much else; and he always tells him when to do it it (provided the actors knows where to look). But he never tells him why. The motive, the WHY, remains the creative task of the actor.”

The form of his plays become all. And that of his peers (and even those who came later- Johnson in particular was very good at identifying the structure of Shakespeare’s plays).

Thus their entire structure, every single word is written for his actors. And as such while lacking in say stage direction, they actually contain vast realms of information for his cast. By studying this from a performance point of view one can begin to grasp what Shakespeare intended, and given the comparative fame and success of The Kings Men, it is fair to assume that this was how the best actors in the country performed.

From this we get a style of acting (and a style of writing) that is fast, ferocious, lyrical; that uses words to set scenes, to explain moods, to say aloud things nowadays we would leave to stage directions. We have all the subtle nuances of the human condition, but via a 16th century filter.

This is not to say that actors lived up to such high standards. As Richard Brome in his 1638 play ‘The Antipodes’ has one of his characters say to an actor:

’But you, sir, are incorrigible, and

Take license to yourself to add unto

Your parts your own free fancy, and sometimes

To alter or diminish what the writer

With care and skill compos’d...’

Such digressions were fairly commonplace. And would have no doubt been a vexation to the likes of Shakespeare and his numerous peers (a previous answer I gave the other day shows just how many writers were active in his era).

What made a good actor from Shakespeare’s point of view? To quote the man himself:

Speak the speech I pray you as I pronounced it

to you, trippingly on the tongue, but if you

mouth it as many of your players do, I had as

lief the town crier had spoke my lines.

Sources:

-Braumuller and Hattaway (edited); The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama; 1990; Cambridge University Press (p29)

-Donaldson, Ian; Ben Johnson:A life; 2012; Oxford University Press (p26)

-Hall, Peter; Shakespeare’s Advice to the players; 2003; Oberon Books

Original Pronunciation: One of the men who has promoted OP over the last decade (Ben Crystal) here delivers Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ speech in its original pronunciation. Worth it alone to give you a flavour of what Burbage would have sounded like. https://youtu.be/qYiYd9RcK5M